The action never stops in the low-stakes world of engine vs. engine chess competitions. Our previous fortnightly post mentioned two winners:
LCZero Wins TCEC Cup 11; Stockfish Wins CCC19 Bullet
(January 2023; 'For the first time in a long while, an engine other than Stockfish won a TCEC or CCC event'). Here's a summary of that post:-
TCEC:
In the 'Cup 11' Final match, LCZero and Stockfish tied the regulation games +1-1=10, then LCZero won the second pair of tiebreak games.
In the Bronze match for 'Cup 11' third place, KomodoDragon and Ethereal tied +0-0=12; KomodoDragon won the second pair of tiebreak games.
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CCC:
In the 'CCC19 Bullet Challenger' match, Dragon beat Lc0 527.0-473.0, and in the Final match Stockfish beat Dragon 616.0-384.0.
Since the action never stops, what's the current situation?
TCEC:
After 'Cup 11', the site organized 'Swiss 4'; see
TCEC Swiss 4
for the rules.
Of the 11 'double rounds', the event is currently in the eighth. Stockfish is leading by a half-point ahead of Ethereal and KomodoDragon, which are ahead of 39 other engines. The event should run for another week. For a summary of the previous Swiss, see
Stockfish Wins TCEC Swiss 3 and CCC17 Blitz
(July 2022).
CCC:
After the
'CCC19 Bullet Final' match, the site held a series of exhibition events. The most important was probably the 'CCC19 Bullet Alt Final' match, where
Stockfish beat Lc0 301.0-199.0 in a 500 game match. Extrapolating this to the 1000 games played in the 'Final' match, shows that Lc0 performed somewhat better than Dragon.
After this, the CCC conducted a series of events under the header
'Stockfish Thread Dominance'.
The first was titled,
'Stockfish Thread Dominance: Weiss'.
What were these mysterious matches? The 'Info' tab for the Weiss match misleadingly says, 'Format: CCC19 Bullet (1|1) will consist of the following Events...', and the PGN for the individual games offers nothing informative beyond 'TimeControl "60+1"', i.e. a one minute (bullet) game with one second per move increment, aka '(1|1)'.
Stockfish won 73.5-26.5.
The only real info I could find was from end-January:
Does this count as anything groundbreaking?
(reddit.com)
The post showed a screenshot of the result of 'Stockfish Thread Dominance: Dragon', where Dragon beat Stockfish 70.0-30.0, and continued,
'Obviously Stockfish has lost individual games but a whole match? And it looked pretty one-sided.'
The most informative comment to the question answered,
That is why the event was called "Stockfish thread dominance", because it was Stockfish with just 1 thread playing against a bunch of different engines, each one stronger than the last, and giving the opponents the full 250 threads available, essentially giving them 250 times more computing power.
Stockfish vs Weiss: Stockfish won by a landslide (0, 0, 9, 35, 6)
Stockfish vs Black Marlin: Stockfish won by a landslide (0, 0, 2, 41, 7)
[...; eight matches total]
The numbers in parentheses, which always add up to 50, weren't explained. There were nine such events listed in the CCC archive.
As I was writing this post, the site had just finished 'OpenBench Interlude #7 - Top 6'. As for plans:-
!next
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Actual last Stockfish dominance match: SF Dev 256-thread vs SF Dev 1-thread [not mentioned in the Reddit thread]. Then we are onto 'CCC20 Blitz : Newcomers'.
For this blog's reports on the three main stages of CCC19 -- Blitz, Rapid, Bullet -- see:-
From this we can deduce that each stage runs for about a month and a half.
[For further information from the various stakeholders in the engine-to-engine events, see the tab 'TCEC/CCC Links' at the top of this page.
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NB: Leela = LC0 = LCzero; Dragon = KomodoDragon]
It's hard to believe, but in the nearly 17 years that I've been writing this blog and the nearly 13 years that I've been posting for the series titled
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